I get the notion that I must go back to church – Catholic church – to imbibe a small bit of the poison that has maimed me, like how homeopathy works (or doesn’t work). I realised that I wanted to understand how the church affected me and my relationship with my body and with my sexual energies. This is also to do with alcohol. My therapist had suggested I see about sipping some holy wine, to bring alcohol into a reverent relationship, because it can be used in that way, as a holy entry point. I wasn’t so sure. I am so afraid of booze. Mostly I think because I want it so much. I fear my appetites – for sex, for alcohol, for abandon, for release, for connection. I fear my bigness, fear I will be rejected if I don’t play along.
So, for these two reasons, alcohol and to take in a bit of the old poison, I went back to church. Three Sundays ago, I entered the St Charles Catholic church, 10 minutes from me. It is a round building, with large sweeping buttresses like being inside a half orange. The vaulted ceiling is turquoise, and the stained glass windows shine at each wedge. The altar is in the middle, and all draped in purple for Lent. It is just past Ash Wednesday.
Ah, it is so familiar. I remember it precisely and feel this deep comfort enter me, which I find incredible. Surely I hate it, this institution that so alienated me from my own salt, my own waters, my own animal? What I found to my total surprise was a sweetness. A group of people gathered and sang in high quivering voices and stood and sat and kneeled, allowing a structure to hold them and to let them pass through. I marvelled at the ritual, the gold of the chalice, the white folded linen, embroidered and starched and ironed, crisp edges, unstained despite it being used to wipe the place where the priest’s lips touch the red wine cup. A ritual is performed, and here we all are, encircling it, the wafer held up and bowed to and consumed. Genuflecting at the pews, holy water at the door, a dance of up and sing and queue and kneel and sit and sing and stand and repeat-after-me.
I had brought my notebook to try to jot down the points of pain, the places where my small, unsuspecting body was sliced. But instead I just felt this tenderness. Here was a group of people trying at the end of their week to meet with something numinous, making moves to be moved, getting onto their knees after standing in authority all week – only here and in the bedroom can one come to one’s knees in this way. Sweetness, tenderness, and this understanding: this institution hurt me, harmed and damaged me, but wounding is necessary and unavoidable. If not this, then something else. You have to be wounded to grow up. You have to. This bore the shape of it for me. But it is also intrinsically sweet. I don’t know if God is there anymore than anywhere else, in any other moment, but I know it creates a container and a focus that is helpful when you are busy. There is also community there and sincerity – of a kind.
This morning I went back to church. This too was a big move for me, because the first time I could hide behind this idea: I’m going to take some of the poison, or, I’m on a research trip, I aim to find out how this place damaged me. Going back meant I had to admit something really uncool (and, God, I want to be cool): I love it. I love the ceremony. I love the terrible songs, the somberness and the altar boys and girls in their robes, the bells and bibs. I think it is likely this is because it is familiar, but there is something else too, something to do with authority and adoration. There is love inside structure. I like going to the office. I like the familiar – my favourite thing to do is rewatch beloved movies. The structure is not itself inherently anything at all. And you can rail against it, or you can be inside it and numb and doing everything by rote. Neither will bring you anything alive. But there’s another possibility, and another way to think of and relate to authority: with joy, on your knees and in love. Ah, here it is again: sex and God, intertwined.
I choose a pew near the front this time, on the other side of the church to the last time I went. I sit next to a small, older nun with a high beautiful voice. It is just her and I on the pew. Come communion, she is quick on the draw, jumps up faster than I’ve clocked it’s time to step into the queue and I let her go first. I take communion. I try to feel what it’s like to take the wafer, to say, Amen, after it’s handed to me (“the body of Christ”, “Amen”), to eat it (!) and then return. I feel little, except a kind of churning.
But when I circle back to my pew, the nun is already kneeling and hard at prayer, eyes closed. Uh oh. I continue on and circle back round to the now-long queue. It looks as though I’m coming round for a second helping. I try to look innocent and sheepish, meeting no one’s eye so they can’t silently chastise me for over-eating the body of Christ.
I make it back to my pew (the second to front row, what was I thinking?) and take a seat. The nun is no longer kneeling. As I sit there, the wafer now a slightly sour-tasting sludge on the roof of my mouth, I begin to meditate. I have had this persistent feeling throughout that I’m receiving all this on the wrong channel. It is not in my mind. I need to move down in my body, into my heart and stomach. I will know more from there. I meditate and move down, and as I begin to calm, I find inside me a skeleton figure, an old, old man like a baby bird, big and neglected and thin. He crawls onto my lap. I begin to cry. Oh, oh, oh, this part has been in the dark, unnourished and alone for so long. I don’t know what it is exactly, but I hold it and wrap it in a gold, silk cloth in my mind. I touch his bald head, stroke the bristly hairs. Oh, oh. I am Mary in the Pieta. I am moved. I am moved.
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